January 2003 Archives

A common tradition in chess matches is that only the winner has to show up at the press conference. The loser is in no frame of mind for polite conversation. After a draw, both players come. Kasparov lost game three...

The delighted programmers of Junior, Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky of Israel, had just finished speaking at the game three postgame press conference when Kasparov surprised us by showing up. I sincerely thought Kasparov was joking when he responded to...

Israeli Grandmaster Boris Alterman is a friend of mine. We worked together at KasparovChess.com in Israel and for several years afterwards after I moved to New York. It was great to see him again now that he's here for...

In case of a major technical problem, the Deep Junior team has prepared an entire backup machine that can take over a game in an instant. (They have to make any repairs on their clock time.) The main machine is...

Apart from being the top player in the world for 17 years, Garry Kasparov is the uncontested chessplayer champion of the press conference. His long answers, clever replies, and controversial opinions never fail to bring out the media in droves....

Q: What do you get when you take French organizers, Russian and Israeli players, German designers, and Canadian promoters and have them stage a big event in America? A: A high-profile chess match that launches on Super Bowl Sunday! The...

The official rules to Kasparov-Junior were finally released today. They are almost identical to the preliminary ones I looked at and made small contributions to many months ago. Overall they are vastly superior to the favoritism built in to the...

The women's playoff for the title (won in an upset by Anna Hahn just moments ago) was almost as exciting as the press center was the night before round nine. The original round nine pairings had women's leader Jennifer Shahade...

You would think that most internationally ranked players (and arbiters!) would be familiar with the laws of chess. On the same day in the US Championship we had two cases to challenge this theory, both about the same rule. Most...

The latest episode of the FIDE-Ponomariov soap opera ran yesterday, with FIDE replying to Ponomariov's letter. FIDE is clearly winning the battle if you go by word count. One thing that is finally clear to me from this latest document...

The latest rules and regulations fun happened today in round eight. Kriventsov's mobile phone rang during his game with Markzon. And he answered it! He spoke for a few seconds before arbiter Carol Jarecki showed up on the scene. He...

Yesterday was the first time in a while we have heard from Mrs. Nahed Ojjeh, a Syrian-born French millionaire who has spent piles of money supporting the arts in France and who turned her eye to supporting French chess. A...

Hello from the great Northwest! Safely on the ground and with a DSL connection, what more could I ask? Tomorrow I'll be hanging out at the US Championship at the Seattle Center. Here's a pic of defending women's champ...

US women's champion Jennifer Shahade has been invited to do the "Bob Rivers and Twisted Radio" morning show at Seattle classic rock radio station KZOK on the Tuesday the 14th. (US Ch off day.) If you're in the Seattle area...

Ponomariov's letter to FIDE regarding the negotiations around his match with Kasparov (DD 21) was quickly translated into English thanks to two ChessNinja Boardistas, IdleKilla and jackiechan. The global (chess) village in action! The incoherency of Ponomariov's missive helps illustrate...

Here's GM Walter Browne on his 54th birthday during yesterday's second round of the US Championship in Seattle. I hope the present wasn't a hand-me-down vest from Yasser Seirawan. (It was wine, there was singing, he drew with Gulko.)...

The Corus Wijk aan Zee pairings are up and the tournament starts today. Start counting down until Round 8 on Monday the 20th when we'll see Kramnik-Anand. The Ukrainian grudge-match Ivanchuk-Ponomariov is in the final round. There's no "Dutch Open"...

Just in comes a vaguely coherent panicky message from the one-man-band of Ukrainian chess journalism on the web, Grandmaster Mikhail Golubev. He says the Ukrainian chess federation has delivered an ultimatum from FIDE to Ruslan Ponomariov: sign this contract today...

Most of the favorites won in the first round. (Last year six-time champ Walter Browne lost to 16-year-old Cindy Tsai in the first.) One of the top US juniors, IM Hikaru Nakamura, was not happy when defending women's champion Jen...

The US Championship begins today in Seattle. Defending champ (and future Black Belt contributor) Larry Christiansen faces Kaufman in the first round of nine. One of the various changes made after America's Foundation for Chess saved the event a...

ChessBase has a hilarious report by the inimitable (and, sadly, too often untranslatable) Andre Schultz on a case of computer cheating at a recent tournament. (The answer, for those of you who remember the boardgame 'Clue': "The patzer, in the...

After a major screw-up in rating the games from the 2002 Bled (Slovenia) Olympiad it appears that FIDE will have to recall the January list. Hundreds of players were given free gifts when the chief arbiter in Bled counted all...

ChessBase has some documents detailing the latest developments in the First International Bank of Israel's lawsuit against Garry Kasparov. As I conjectured below, (DD 7, 11) they were trying to go after Kasparov instead of the company KasparovChess Online...

The annual Spanish supertournament in Linares has concreted Vladimir Kramnik's participation for 2003. The announced field is now Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand, Leko [not Adams], Ponomariov, Vallejo, and Radjabov! It will assuredly follow its usual double round-robin (all-play-all twice) and should...

Speaking of supertournaments, Wijk aan Zee starts on January 10. The annual beer and pea-soup festival will be without Kasparov for the second consecutive year after he won three straight. Last year he was sick; this year he'll be...

Some fresh dirt from the UK. Private Eye magazine had a lot of fun exposing GM Ray Keene and BrainGames.net and their various legal and financial shenanigans. Keene and BGN handed off to the UK Einstein Group, apparently telling...

You read it here first, the January 7-9th Jerusalem "exhibition games" between Kasparov and Deep Junior have been cancelled. The match was originally scheduled to be in held entirely in Jerusalem back in October 2002. These two exhibition games were...

Ninja member jackiechan sends us an update on the lawsuit against Kasparov mentioned below (28-12-02). (This isn't really chess news but when something new pops up we'll let you know. The future of what was the largest chess website is...

No news is bad news when it comes to chess reunification. Last heard, FIDE champion Ruslan Ponomariov was still insisting on getting draw odds in his match with Kasparov tentatively scheduled for next Spring. He may just be holding...

Love him, hate him, or sue him, but you've got to give up the major props to Garry Kasparov the chessplayer. The new FIDE rating list is out and Kasparov added nine points to his lead over Kramnik and is...